- Source
- Poor Richard’s Almanack
- Date
- 1747
Meaning of “Lost time is never found again.”
Time is treated as uniquely unrecoverable, which gives ordinary delay a real opportunity cost.
Where does it come from?
Poor Richard’s Almanack.
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“Procrastination is the thief of time. Collar him!”
Meaning & context
Delay is personified as a thief because it quietly removes time that cannot later be recovered.
Source details
David Copperfield; Mr. Micawber’s advice.
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“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”
Meaning & context
Seneca shifts the complaint from life being too brief to attention and time being poorly spent.
Source details
English wording varies by translation.
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“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.”
Meaning & context
Time is treated as the substance from which life is built, so wasting it means spending something that cannot be recovered.
Source details
Poor Richard’s Almanack; the maxim connects the value of life directly with the use of time.
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“work while it is called Today.”
Meaning & context
The sentence places useful effort in the time actually available now, making present action more important than indefinite postponement.
Source details
Past and Present, Book III, Chapter XII, “Reward,” printed page 251 in Thomas Carlyle’s Collected Works, Library Edition, Vol. XIII (London: Chapman and Hall), Project Gutenberg #26159. Carlyle says one shall “work while it is called Today” immediately before “For the Night cometh, wherein no man can work,” retaining the biblical allusion and nineteenth-century religious exhortation rather than reframing it as productivity science.
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Image design Botanical Sage
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“Well done is better than well said.”
Meaning & context
Franklin gives execution priority over impressive promises or intentions.
Source details
Poor Richard’s Almanack.
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“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”
Meaning & context
Time ignored earlier becomes painfully visible later, when opportunities narrow and delay can no longer be recovered.
Source details
Richard II, Act V, Scene V in the represented 1921 Yale edition. Richard's 'I wasted time, and now doth time waste me' occurs in the prison soliloquy as he compares broken musical time with his ruined political life. The First Folio facsimile numbers the corresponding prison scene differently, so the Yale route is used to preserve this collection's modern scene numbering.
